Karyn M. Newton

Dr. Jenifer Neils

ARTH 433

December 10, 2010

Creatures from the Wine-Dark Sea:

Images of Sea Deities and Monsters in Ancient Literature and Art

Since the earliest days of the Western literary tradition, the tales of gods, goddesses,

heroes, and monsters have provided craftsmen and artists with a wealth of verbal imagery that

was then translated into visual images. Because the epic poems we now know as the Iliad and the

Odyssey, along with others now lost to modern readers, were originally either recited or sung,

one did not need to be literate to know about Achilles’ feats during the Trojan War or the perils

Odysseus and his comrades faced on their ten-year journey home from the war. Other works, in

particular Hesiod’s Theogony, describe the origins of the earth, sky, and ocean, all born of

primordial Chaos, the Titans, the Olympians, and many of the monsters that populate Greek

mythology. Over time, however, different versions of these stories developed. In some cases,

new imagery developed that was markedly different from the original versions. In others, even

the players themselves change with no extant literary record that might explain why or how one

god has supplanted another in the story. Add to these literary developments the power of the

human imagination, and one can easily see how so many visual variations could arise from a

single original theme. By looking at the development over time of both the literary and visual

images of Nereus, Triton, Scylla, and the sea monsters known collectively as ketos, one can see

that some images tended to remain fairly static over a long period of time, while others changed

very dramatically.

Nereus was an old sea-god, the son of Pontus and Gaea, and the father of the Nereids

borne by his wife, Doris. He, Doris, and their fifty daughters lived in the depths of the sea.

Nereus was considered a gentle and wise elder, and thus took on the epithet Halios Geron, the

Old Man of the Sea. Like other sea deities, Nereus had the gift of prophecy and the ability to

change shapes at will (LIMC 824). Hesiod’s Theogony contains the following description of the

god:

Pontos begot Nereus, truthful and never false,

eldest of his children; he is called the Old Man

since he is true and gentle; what is lawful he remembers,

and he knows just and gentle thoughts. (Hesiod 25)

Perhaps the story most closely associated with Nereus is his involvement in Herakles’ eleventh

labor, the earliest account of which appears in the works of Pherekydes, and is later mentioned in

the scholion on Apollonios Rhodios, and Apollodoros’ Bibliotheka, although the latter does not

give any details of the various metamorphoses that take place (Glynn 121). Eurystheus sends

Herakles to gather the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides, in the far west of the

world. However, no mortal man knows the precise location of the garden. Thus, Herakles seeks

out Nereus, the wise prophet, who does know the location. When he arrives, the old man is

asleep, so Herakles seizes him and holds onto him as Nereus changes into numerous forms,

including various animals, water, and even fire as he tries to escape the hero’s clutches.

Eventually, Nereus is forced to submit and reveals the location of the garden to Herakles

(Carpenter 127). As the father of the Nereids, and in particular, Thetis, Nereus is also therefore

the divine grandfather of the hero, Achilles. After Agamemnon has taken Achilles’ spear-bride,

Briseis, as recompense for having to return his own prize, Chryseis, to her father in order to

appease the god Apollo, a wrathful and insulted Achilles turns to his divine mother, Thetis, for

help.

So [Achilles] wept and prayed

and his noble mother heard him, seated near her father,

the Old Man of the Sea in the salt-green depths. (Homer, Iliad 89)

Later literary images of Nereus show him taking on a much more destructive persona. As Virgil

describes the destruction of Troy in Book II of the Aeneid, he likens the chaos to a fierce storm.

Much as colliding fronts in a storm will produce a tornado:

Westerlies crash into south winds and easterlies, loving to joyride

Horses of sunrise. The woods howl; Nereus frothing with

Fury,

Whips up the sea from its bottommost depths with the swish of his

Trident. (Virgil 41)

The visual imagery of Nereus stylistically falls into two groups: Herakles battling a fish-tailed

Nereus and Herakles with a fully human Nereus. On Louvre CA 823 (Fig. 1), an Attic black-

figure lekythos by the Istanbul Painter, a young Herakles not yet wearing the skin of the Nemean

Lion, is shown wrestling the much larger god Nereus. Because Nereus had the ability to change

forms at will, the painter has depicted the protomes of both a lion and a snake springing from his

back as Herakles looks on. Nereus is depicted with long, dark hair and a dark beard, and is clad

in a tunic patterned at the waist, sleeves, and neck. From the waist down, however, Nereus has a

fish’s tail, complete with incised scales. Ahlberg-Cornell points out that there is a strange lack of

distinction between the shoulders of both combatants, making it somewhat difficult upon first

glance to determine where one ends and the other begins (Ahlberg-Cornell 17). On Boston MFA

99.522 (Fig. 2), an Attic black-figure hydria attributed to the Taleides Painter, Herakles now

wears his lion skin and Nereus’ beard and hair are now white. There are no protomes present, so

the sense of metamorphosis that was present in Louvre CA 823 is now missing from the image.

However, there is a heightened sense of tension in this painting that the former lacked. Nereus is

now stripped to the waist as if he were a wrestler, and the physical exertion of the combatants is

well-depicted by the fine incisions marking out the muscles of Herakles’ legs and the grappling

hands of Nereus trying to break Herakles’ hold on his upper torso (Ahlberg-Cornell 32). As

black-figure vase painting gave way to red-figure, the imagery of this contest changed quite

dramatically. Nereus was now represented either as an older man of gentle disposition, or

perhaps even more aggressive than in the past, but he is no longer a monster. He is now fully

human, taking on a more regal, serene appearance, often carrying a scepter or a staff and wearing

a long chiton and himation. He also offers little resistance to Herakles’ grasp (Glynn 126). On

London E162 (Fig. 3), an Attic red-figure hydria attributed to the Berlin Painter, Herakles

appears once again wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion, armed with a sword, bow, and quiver.

Nereus is shown as an old man with a white beard and hair, carrying a scepter in his right hand

and a fish in his left. As he moves away, Herakles places his left hand on Nereus’ back and

seizes Nereus’ right arm with his own right hand (Walters 10). This is a much less active

composition, and one that clearly illustrates how much the image of Nereus changed in the space

of roughly a century.

Triton, another sea deity, receives little mention in most extant literature. Early on,

Hesiod describes Triton thus:

From Amphitrite and loud-sounding Earth-Shaker

was born great and mighty Triton, who in the sea’s

depth lives with his mother and lord father in

olden homes, an awful god. (Hesiod 47)

He is perhaps best known as a messenger of the sea, described as a merman, who can calm or

raise the waves of the sea by means of his conch shell trumpet. This plays an important role in

the story of the Earth’s (and mankind’s) rebirth after Zeus destroyed it in a flood. Once Zeus sees

that there is only one man, Deucalion, and one woman, Pyrrha, left alive, he summons Triton to

calm the raging sea. As he sounds his trumpet, all the waves hear it and are becalmed. The shores

of the sea are once more visible, and the rivers and streams return to their normal channels

(Morford 100). In his Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote this description of the event:

And Triton, as he rose up from the deep –

his shoulders shell-encrusted – held his conch:

a twisting hollow form that, starting from

a point, then spiraled up to a wide whorl –

the conch that, when it’s sounded in midsea,

reechoes on the shores to west and east. (Ovid 16)

On the former Getty Museum 81.AE.78 (Fig. 4), a Paestan red-figure calyx krater from the 4th c.

BCE signed by Asteas, Triton appears as a young, beardless man, holding a small octopus in his

right hand and an oar in his left (Jentoft-Nilsen 45). He is nude past the waist, and his human

hips are encased in a shell with projecting spines at the lip. Below this shell, Triton has a fish’s

tail very much like the early representations of Nereus showed. In fact, Triton successfully

supplants Nereus in his role as a combatant with Herakles in vase painting by 560 BCE. The

change in combatants is definite and deliberate, and takes place at roughly the same time that the

canonical depiction of Nereus became tailless (Glynn 127). This drastic change occurs despite

the fact that there is no extant literary source relating a contest between Herakles and Triton

almost identical to that between the hero and Nereus. According to Boardman, this new motif

may have had something to do with the Athenians’ naval success against Megara for possession

of the island of Salamis (Glynn 130), or Peisistratos’ desire to control the Hellespont, ensuring

safe passage of Athenian exports of pottery and oil and imports of wheat. Such control would

also allow Peisistratos to interfere with other cities’ trading interests (Glynn 131). By showing

Herakles, the favored hero of the Peisistratid dynasty, conquering the sea god Triton, the

message communicated to the public is that Athens controls the seas. After 510 BCE, images of

Herakles and Triton in combat quickly fall out of favor, though. Later depictions of Triton often

took the form of mosaics, in which the god appears to have taken up some of Nereus’ destructive

tendencies. In a Hellenistic Greek Mosaic (Fig. 5) from the 2nd c. BCE, now housed in the Sparta

Archaeological Museum, the single fish tail has now developed into a pair of coiling tails to

either side of the god, who brandishes a club or an oar. Again, he is depicted as young, beardless

and bare-chested, but some sort of covering (perhaps a shell as in the former Getty piece) covers

his hips and genitals. The image of Triton was an enduring one, as a Roman mosaic (Fig. 6)

found in Herculaneum and now held at the National Museum of Archaeology in Naples, Italy

attests. It dates from the first century CE, during the Imperial Roman period, and exhibits many

of the same characteristics found in the mosaic created nearly three centuries earlier. Triton is

shown as a young man, once again beardless and possibly entirely nude, as there does not seem

to be any sort of covering, shell or otherwise, over his genitalia. The development of twin

serpentine fish tails from the earlier single tail is also maintained. Again, he brandishes either an

oar or a club, holding a sea creature in his right hand, and two winged Erotes hover above his left

shoulder. Therefore, it seems that Triton’s image, in both literature and in the visual arts, did not

undergo nearly as radical a change as Nereus’ image did during the sixth century BCE. His basic

iconography – a young beardless male, nude to at least the waist, having either one or two fish

tails and bearing a club or an oar in one hand and often some sort of sea creature in the other,

remained relatively unchanged over the course of several centuries.

I now turn to Scylla, who, along with the whirlpool Charybdis, was the mythical bane of

sailors traveling the Straits of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. When Odysseus

is preparing to leave Circe’s island to continue his journey back to Ithaka, she warns Odysseus

not to steer his boat too close to the cave where Scylla dwells:

Scylla lurks inside it – the yelping horror,

yelping, no louder than any suckling pup

but she’s a grisly monster, I assure you.

No one could look on her with any joy,

not even a god who meets her face-to-face…

She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down,

and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,

each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,

packed tight – and armed to the hilt with black death! (Homer, Odyssey 274)

The reason for Scylla’s appearance would seem to be a direct result of Circe’s own actions,

however. Glaucus, a fisherman, had been transformed into a sea centaur by eating a magical

herb. When he saw the maiden Scylla, he fell in love with her, but she would have nothing to do

with him. Glaucus sought Circe’s aid to attract Scylla’s affections, but Circe herself fell in love

with Glaucus. When he spurned her advances, Circe retaliated by poisoning the waters where

Scylla would bathe during the heat of the day (Aghion, 135).

Then Scylla comes; no sooner has she plunged

waist-deep into the water than she sees,

around her hips, the horrid barking shapes.

At first, not able to believe that these

are part of her own body, Scylla flees;

afraid, she tries to chase off those loud dogs.

But what she flees, she carries with her self;

as she probes her thighs, her shins, her feet,

she finds just gaping dogs in place of these,

the sort of hounds that Cerberus might keep.

Below, her body’s made of these mad dogs;

for at her loins, her belly is cut short;

she stands upon the backs of beastly forms. (Ovid 475)

Even Aeneas must face the dreaded Scylla as he journeys from the ruins of Troy to Italy, where

he will eventually become the founding ancestor of Rome. Along the way, he and his

companions stop at the city of Buthrotum, where Helenus, Priam’s son, is king, and has taken as

his bride Hector’s widow, Andromache. Helenus, aside from being king, is also a priest of

Apollo, so before departing, Aeneas consults this oracle regarding the remainder of the voyage.

Helenus issues this warning to him about sailing near the shores of Sicily:

Steer clear of the shores and the waters to starboard…

Scylla keeps watch on the starboard side; on the larboard, Charybdis

Suctions vast waves down an abyss spun deep by her whirling

Spirals of tides three times each day; then, reversing her motion,

Vomits them up to the skies, strikes stars with a whiplash of water.

Scylla, confined to a cavern’s concealing protection of darkness,

Constantly darts out her mouth, drags ships onto reefs of

Destruction.

First glance shows one a human face and a girl with a pretty

Torso, as far as the groin. But below that, a sea-serpent’s monstrous

Body with wolfish bellies that merge into dolphin-like tail flukes (Virgil 67).

The earliest visual representations of Scylla in ancient art do not come from the Greek world, but

rather, from the Etruscans on an ivory box from about 600 BCE. Her first appearance in Greek

art does not come until the mid-fifth century BCE, and the image one sees is much closer to

Ovid’s and Virgil’s imaginings than Homer’s description. The monster does not have six heads,

but a single human head without triple rows of teeth. She does not have twelve legs, but instead,

a fish’s tail, and issuing from her waist are the heads (and often forepaws) of dogs or wolves

(Buitron 136). On Louvre CA 1341 (Fig. 7), a Boeotian red-figure bell krater, we see Scylla,

brandishing a sword in her right hand, with two dogs or wolves emerging from her torso, and a

serpentine tail fashioned in a spiral behind her. On the former Getty 81.AE.78 (Fig. 8), a Paestan

red-figure calyx krater, Scylla is again shown with two dogs or wolves protruding from her

midsection as she carries a trident in her right hand. As with the image of Triton on the same

vase, Scylla’s waist is enclosed in a shell with protruding spines, and her curled fish tail extends

behind her. The canonical imagery of Scylla, like that of Triton, did not change much over the

centuries. In a Hellenistic pebble mosaic (Fig. 9) from the House of Dionysus in Nea Paphos,

Cyprus, the monster is still depicted with several dogs or wolves extending from her torso, a long

fish-like tail (although it now seems to be taking on a more serpentine or dragon-like

appearance), and a stylized trident in her left hand. In her right hand, she holds the broken prow

of a ship she has presumably just destroyed. Nearly four hundred years later, the image of Scylla

would appear on a mosaic floor in the frigidarium of the Baths of Neptune in Ostia Antica (Fig.

10). Instead of brandishing a trident, she now holds an oar above her head with both hands, and

the single tail now becomes three sinuous tentacles that appear where her legs should be. The

basic formula of a nude woman with dogs or wolves emanating from her midsection is still there,

although there seems to be more of a sense of movement in this mosaic due to the curving lines

of her tentacles. In sum, there is a gradual change in one of Scylla’s features – namely, her tail or

tentacles – but the overall image remains the same for several centuries, but it bears very little

resemblance to the original literary image set forth in Homer’s Odyssey.

The last group to which I will turn my attention is that of the sea-monsters known as

ketos. Aeschylus, in The Libation Bearers, says this of the various monsters inhabiting the

world:

Many are the terrors bred of earth,

dread and woeful,

and the embraces of the ocean teem

with monsters inimical to mortals;

and between earth and heaven there come into being

lights that shine by day;

and winged things and things that walk the earth can tell

also of the stormy wrath of whirlwinds (Aeschylus 43).

The monsters teeming in the embrace of the ocean are these ketos. Two of these ketos in

particular played a large role in mythology. The Ketos Troias was sent by Poseidon to destroy

the countryside of Troy in retaliation for King Laomedon’s refusal to pay the god for building

the walls of the great city. An oracle revealed that the only way to appease the monster (and

Poseidon) would be for the king to sacrifice his daughter, Hesione, to the ketos (Carpenter 126).

Herakles, returning from the land of the Amazons after winning the Girdle of Hippolyte, saw the

princess chained to a rock, awaiting her doom. Herakles offered to save Hesione for Laomedon,

but as payment, the king would have to give him the horse Zeus had given him for allowing him

to carry off his son, Ganymede. Laomedon agreed to the bargain, Herakles killed the monster,

and saved the princess. However, Laomedon once again reneged on his agreement. As revenge

for breaking his word, Herakles would later lead the first expedition of the Greeks against Troy.

During the battle, Laomedon and all his sons were killed, except for Priam, who would rule Troy

until its destruction by the armies led by Agamemnon at the end of the Trojan War (Mayerson

307). The second ketos of any major importance is the Ketos Aithiopios, the sea monster sent to

attack the kingdom of Aethiopa after Queen Cassiopeia rashly boasted that her daughter,

Andromeda, was more beautiful than the Nereids. In order to lift the curse of the ketos from the

kingdom, Poseidon demanded that Andromeda be sacrificed to the ketos. Perseus, who was

flying home after recently slaying the Medusa, saw the beautiful princess chained to the rock

below and flew down to save her, after her parents had promised her hand in marriage to the hero

(Woodford 129). Ovid writes this description of the battle between Perseus and the ketos:

[D]own, through the empty air, [Perseus] swooped headlong;

assailing from above the roaring beast,

he dug his curving blade unto the hilt

into the snake’s right shoulder. That deep wound

drives Ammon’s dragon wild; he now soars high

into the air, and now the monster dives

beneath the waves, and now he thrashes like

a savage boar, hemmed in and terrified,

encircled by a crowd of baying hounds.

The monster’s fangs are eager; to escape

their poison, with his swift wings Perseus leaps

above, aside; and where he can, he strikes

against the monster’s shell-encrusted back,

its flanks, and then its tail where it thins out

in fishlike form…” (Ovid 138).

The most common Classical function of the ketos, though, is as a means of transport for the

Nereids, who are often depicted riding them, and especially in the context of bearing fresh armor

to Troy for their nephew, Achilles (Boardman 74). Boardman describes the general image of the

ketos as having a fishy tail, either dolphin-like or fuller and more like a true fish, a serpentine

body, often covered with scales and having a softer underside, with a long, writhing tail. It may

have two forelegs like that of a lion, flippers, or even horse’s legs. The face and the muzzle may

resemble that of a lion, a dog, a fish, or even a pig. The vast majority of ketos are not winged,

although some may have fins that strongly resemble wings (ibid). On Boston MFA 63.420 (Fig.

11), a Corinthian black-figure column krater from about 550 BCE, Herakles can be seen

attacking the Ketos Troias with his bow, while the princess Hesione attacks it with rocks. The

ketos itself appears to be emerging from a cave, so only its skull-like head is visible. On a

slightly later Caeretan black-figure hydria from the Stavros S. Niarchos collection in Athens

(Fig. 12), Herakles is shown fighting the now fully-visible ketos with a sickle-shaped sword. The

ketos more closely resembles a shark or a fish, with large pointed teeth and a row of serrated fins

running down its back. The underbelly is white and has the appearance of being much more

vulnerable than the beast’s back, and its tail resembles that of a dolphin. The image of the Ketos

Aithiopios that appears on the former Getty Museum 84.AE.996 (Fig. 13), an Apulian red-figure

amphora from about 325 BCE attributed to the Metope Group, is considerably different than its

predecessors. Instead of having a fish-like appearance, the ketos has more of the appearance of a

dragon or a serpent, and while it still has the tail of a fish, the fins on the front of its body seem

to be acting almost like legs. The nude Perseus is shown attacking the ketos with the same sickle-

like sword as Herakles used against the Ketos Troias, as the chained Andromeda looks on from

above. The Romans also appreciated the imagery of this myth, as is evidenced by a fresco from

the Imperial Villa at Boscotrecase from the late 1st c. CE (Fig. 14). Now housed at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (MMA 20.192.16), this painting contains a good

portion of the narrative that Ovid related in his Metamorphoses. On the left hand side of the

painting, Perseus can be seen flying in over the water, where the ketos rears its head out of the

water, about to devour Andromeda. Andromeda is at the center of the fresco, chained to a tall

rock with funeral offerings at her feet. To the right of the chained princess, Perseus is shown

shaking hands with Andromeda’s father, indicating that they have sealed the bargain, granting

Andromeda to Perseus as his bride if he rescues her from the monster. The ketos itself is not seen

in its entirety, but is shown with its bearded, dragon-like head emerging from the water, and a

part of its coiled serpentine tail in the water behind it. Thus, it is easy to see that the image of the

ketos itself changed quite dramatically over the centuries, from a simple, shark-like creature to

something much more fantastical, although the stories of Perseus and Andromeda and Herakles

and Hesione remained basically the same, with only minor variations.

Thus, in the final analysis, one can easily see that while many of the verbal and visual

images found in ancient literature and art showed little, if any, real development over the course

of time, as in the case of Triton, other images like those of Nereus and the ketos in the visual arts

and that of Scylla in ancient literature underwent fairly drastic, if not radical, changes through

the intervening years. Whether these changes were due to public sentiment, the political climate

of the time, or simply the artist’s or author’s imagination, we may never know for certain. But

the stories and the images contained in ancient Greek and Roman literature continue to inspire

artists even in our own time, some two and a half millennia after they were originally sung or

written.

Works Cited

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---.. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Print.

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Works Consulted

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Aghion, Irene, et al. Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity. Trans. Leonard. N. Amico. New

York: Flammarion, 1996. Print.

Ahlberg-Cornell, Gudrun. Herakles and the Sea-Monster in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting.

Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 1984. Print.

Beazley, J.D. Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters. London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1956.

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Boardman, John. “’Very Like a Whale’ – Classical Sea Monsters.” Monsters and Demons in the

Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Papers Presented in Honor of Edith Porada. Eds. Ann E.

Farkas, Prudence O. Harper, and Evelyn B. Harrison. Mainz on Rhine: P. von Zabern,

1987. pp. 73 – 84. Print.

Buitron, Diana, et al. The Odyssey and Ancient Art: An Epic in Word and Image. New York:

Edith C. Blum Art Institute, 1992. Print.

Carpenter, Thomas H. Art and Myth in Ancient Greece: A Handbook. New York: Thames and

Hudson Inc., 1990. Print.

Glynn, Ruth. “Herakles, Nereus and Triton: A Study of Iconography in Sixth Century Athens.”

American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Apr. 1981): pp. 121 – 132. Print.

Hanfmann, M.A. “The Scylla of Corvey and Her Ancestors.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers Vol. 41,

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Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Richard S. Caldwell. Newburyport, MA: Focus Information Group,

Inc., 1987. Print.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Print.

---.. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Print.

Jentoft-Nilsen, Marit R. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum; J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Fasc. 4

(U.S.A. Fasc. 27). Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1991. Print.

Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae.(LIMC). Vol. VI.1 – Kentauroi – Oiax. Zürich:

Artemis Verlag Zürich und München, 1992. Print.

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Fig. 1

Paris, Musee du Louvre CA 823. Attic black-figure lekythos by the Istanbul Painter, ca. 590

BCE. Beazley #300106.

Fig. 2

Boston Museum of Fine Arts 99.522. Attic black-figure hydria attributed to the Taleides Painter,

ca. 530 BCE. Beazley #72.

Fig. 3

London British Museum E162. Attic red-figure hydria attributed to the Berlin Painter, ca. 490

BCE. Beazley #202006.

Fig. 4

Detail of former J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu 81.AE.78. Paestan red-figure calyx krater signed

by Asteas, ca. 340 BCE.

Fig. 5

Sparta Archaeological Museum, Hellenistic Greek mosaic, 2nd c. BCE

Fig. 6

National Museum of Archaeology, Naples. Roman mosaic from Herculaneum, 1st c. CE.

Fig. 7

\

Detail of Paris, Musee du Louvre 1341. Boeotian red-figure bell krater, ca. 440 BCE. Beazley

#1009210.

Fig. 8

Detail of former J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu 81.AE.78. Paestan red-figure calyx krater signed

by Asteas, ca. 340 BCE.

Fig. 9

House of Dionysus, Nea Paphos, Cyprus. Hellenistic pebble mosaic, ca. 300 BCE

Fig.10

Baths of Neptune, Ostia Antica, Italy. Detail of mosaic floor in Room 5 (frigidarium), ca. 139

CE.

Fig. 11

Detail of Boston Museum of Fine Arts 63.420. Corinthian black-figure column krater, ca. 550

BCE.

Fig. 12

Stavros S. Niarchos collection, Athens, Greece. Detail of Caeretan black-figure hydria, ca. 530

BCE.

Fig. 13

Detail of former J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu 84.AE.996. Apulian red-figure amphora

attributed to the Metope Group, ca. 325 BCE. Beazley #1002021.

Fig. 14

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 20.192.16. Imperial Roman fresco from the Mythology

Room, Villa of Agrippa Postumus at Boscotrecase, Italy, late 1st c. CE.